Letters

Letters

And Now for Something Completely Different

There is a nice Python tutorial in the June 2007 issue
[“Programming Python, Part I” by José P. E. Fernandez]. It would be
wonderful if, after the tutorial is done, a monthly Python column would
appear in the pages of Linux Journal. (I have seen columns on other
languages, for example, Perl, but never a column on Python.)

—
Richard

BSD Script Modification

In the “Displaying Image Directories in Apache, Part IV” article by Dave
Taylor [July 2007], I ran into a problem using the script on my hosting company's
BSD-based system. Specifically, the problem was in the figuresize
function returning an invalid width value.

This change solved my problem and makes the function more efficient by
eliminating four invocations of cut for every image.

—
Doug Winterburn

Recognize This

I've been more than getting my money's worth from LJ just from Dave
Taylor's Work the Shell articles, but this month, my introduction
to Tesseract doubled my pleasure [“Tesseract: an Open-Source
Optical Character Recognition
Engine” by Anthony Kay, July 2007]. I have been looking for an OCR
program since I quit Microsoft seven years ago, and now I have one.
Tesseract is outstanding, and Anthony Kay did a great job with the
article.

—
Bruce Bales

Error Handling Instead of Ignoring

I am writing regarding to the article “Writing Your Own Image
Gallery Application with the UNIX Shell” by Girish Venkatachalam,
published in the July 2007 issue of Linux Journal.

In the script on page 71, Girish suppressed the mkdir error by
redirecting the error message to the bit bucket:

# we don't want mkdir shouting at us for
# directories that exist!
mkdir $dimension 2>/dev/null

My suggestion is to do it this way instead:

# use -e instead of -d, since an existing
# file with the same name could also prevent
# you from creating the directory
[ -e $dimension ] || mkdir $dimension

Even better, handle the mkdir error this way after the mkdir error:

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo Handle my error here
fi

Thanks for the great magazine, and keep up the good work.

—
Jack

Response to the “Don't Just Beat Me, Teach Me” Letter, July
2007

Writing instructional software from scratch for Linux (or any other OS
for that matter) is a time-consuming and nontrivial activity. For
people to invest their time and energy in this, there would definitely
need to be a payoff to make it a worthwhile undertaking. I think a
much more promising approach would be a Linux port of existing
instructional software. ChessMaster is indeed a very fine instructional
package, and I highly recommend it to my students. Several years ago, I
contacted Ubisoft regarding a Linux version of ChessMaster.
Unfortunately, the predictable response was “not planned for the
foreseeable future”. Linux has gained a lot of traction since then, even
in relatively small market niches like chess.

A good example is one of
the world's strongest programs, Shredder (www.shredderchess.com), which
has been made available for Linux. I also happen to work as a consultant
for a North American distributor and retailer (www.chesscountry.com) of
chess software. My recommendation for Convekta (which produces very good
instructional software) Linux software was favorably received, although I
can't make any predictions. As Linux gains critical mass in the chess
sphere, companies like Ubisoft will find it difficult to ignore Linux
lest they risk being displaced by a newcomer. An intense lobbying effort
might be persuasive, and they very well might consider porting to Linux.
There certainly are enough capable developers available to make this
happen.

Until then, I unfortunately have no better recommendation than to make do
with one of the Windows-Linux integration techniques that are available
to us. Mr Colon is quite right not to struggle with Wine. I have made
the determination that running Windows apps via Wine is hit or
miss—half will run after intense configuration effort, and half won't run at all.

The two preferable options are VMware or VNC. If you have only one
computer and money is no object, VMware might be the way to go. My
preferred solution is VNC (which is free). I utilize a multiboot laptop
for my IT-consulting work. The laptop can boot Debian, Red Hat or XP (I
recently removed SUSE for reasons covered in recent issues of
LJ). If I
need to access XP from my desktop, I simply connect the laptop to my home
wireless network, boot XP and start a VNC server. Windows shares are
made visible via Samba. The combination of VNC and Samba yields complete
seamless access to the laptop running XP from my Debian workstation.
Despite the fact that all my hosts are on a wireless network, the VNC
performance is actually quite good. Of course, if you have an exclusively
wired network, performance will even be better.

I think the VNC solution
is a good fit for most Linux users, as most tend to have more than one
computer that already may be networked together. Adding network
connectivity is relatively inexpensive as compared to going the VMware
route.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a Linux equivalent for ChessMaster, but
until one arrives on the scene, I hope these suggestions will tide
ChessMaster users over.

—
Peter Stein

Picture Imperfect

I just noticed the Pixel article [“Interview with Pavel
Kanzelsberger, Creator of Pixel” by James Gray, July 2007]. Please do not promote that
project; it is nothing more than a fraud. You should really look through
their forums. There are many people who have been scammed. It is
not current, it does not work, and there is a one-man team working on it.
Besides that, it is closed source. The project is doomed and a scam, and I
just ask you to please let it die.

—
Anonymous

256MB of RAM Is Plenty

In Nicholas Petreley's “Amazing Free Distributions Abound”
[July 2007], it says, “I run Damn Small Linux
on my old Compaq notebook with 256MB of RAM simply because it won't run
anything more bloated than that”, but I run a full Ubuntu install on a
Pentium 2 with 192MB of RAM. It's a bit slow, but not as bad as Windows
XP was. I'm going to install XFCE instead of GNOME to give it a little
boost, but 256MB is plenty of RAM for the average distro. Debian + IceWM would
be pretty fast too.

—
Mackenzie Morgan

Let's Make a Deal

Nicholas,
Your distro shopping spree in July's issue was entertaining, but it would
be even nicer to read about other source-based distros besides Gentoo. Any
chance of that happening?

I'm probably not the first one to bring this up, but I have to ask you if
your anticipation of the next Linspire has faded by now. The recent deal
between Microsoft and Linspire must have been announced right when you guys were
busy getting the issue printed.

—
Juuso

I'm very disappointed in the recent deals between Microsoft and Linspire,
Xandros and others. Deals like these with Microsoft usually send
Microsoft's new “partners” to the morgue. Time will tell if Linspire and
others find a way to take the money and run or if Microsoft has the
last laugh.—Ed.

Comments

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(Oct 2007) Dr. Chuck Adam's letter raises some interesting questions, and anybody who has an answer is free to answer.
He mentions that his 1972 Ph.D. dissertation cost $1,000,000 on an CDC 7600. Does anybody have any idea what the equivalent in today's computing power would cost. Or, if I had $1,000,000 to spend today, what could I get for that money? Or, if I had today's equivalent if $1,000,000 (in 1972's dollars), what could I get today?